In the book I read, The Swiss Family Robinson, the family was ship wrecked on an island. Their boat was made of wood. Nowadays boats are made of metal and have radar or other tracking devices on board. Instead of leather masts we have giant motor propelled rudders and jets. Instead of just transportation today boats are used for pleasure, or even marriages. They have boats with big swimming pools, dining areas, tennis courts and even the movie theaters on-board. Many years ago about only 30 people would go on a boat as a crew. Now boats get a crew of thousands of people.
In the book I read the son's and their father carried hunting guns. Those guns were called flintlocks, meaning they only sparked some gun powder to set them off. The ammunition for these guns was small steel pellets that were not terribly powerful. Flintlocks also took a long time to load. In the present-day, the world has made much better more powerful and efficient guns, like machine guns that will shoot hundreds of bullets one after another very quickly without having to reload. The shots are much more powerful too. They also have pistols that shoot maybe 20 shots one after another but not as quickly as the machine guns. These pistols are very small (maybe six inches long) but much more powerful than a big long flintflock. Some pistols today even have a laser scope to pinpoint targets. Guns today that look a lot like flintlocks are maybe 100 times more powerful than they were. These guns now are called shotguns or rifles. These guns can shoot sometimes at least three to four miles but from maybe one hundred yards away, a certain shotgun could put a hole right through a 4 in. piece of plywood. A flintlock bullet, on the other hand would swerve and maybe only go one hundred yards and bounce off of a piece of plywood from that distance.
In this book the Robinson's picked seven feet into the mountain with pick axes until they reached a huge beautiful cavern of salt